Introduction
In this blog I hope to explore how awareness and acceptance of the messages our emotions bring us can influence our resilience. I contrast this with our natural tendency to resist, struggle with, control or rationalise our emotional experiences.
Psychology has great difficulty in defining what we mean by emotion. In this context I am characterising it as a combination of iteratively interactive internal experiences associated with physiological changes in the body plus associated cognitions and action tendencies. Many psychological approaches distinguish between cognitions and emotions and indeed we experience our thoughts and feelings differently but in practice they are usually closely linked and hard to separate. The ideas of acceptance discussed here apply equally to feelings, thoughts and sensations.
Our information alert systems
I describe these three elements of physiological symptoms or sensations (such as anxiety “butterflies in the tummy”), emotions and cognitions as different types of messages about something in our environment that our biological, evolutionary and personal learning histories want to draw our attention to. These are our incoming data alerts, rather like different types of pop ups we might see from email, messaging, social media etc when we are working on a document. Our challenge is to decide how to relate to these messages, (which alerts have important information, which are unhelpful) and how we respond to them in a flexible and considered way that helps us live a full and meaningful life rather than being hijacked by them. What we do know about emotions is that they are generally short lived experiences that pass in their own time and they are not easily controlled by force of will, they run their own course.
Resilience
The metaphor I like best for explaining the many different definitions of resilience is that of a tree in a strong wind. Resilience is represented by the tree that can bend in the wind rather than break (resistance resilience), that bounces back quickly to its previous shape once the wind abates (recovery or normalisation resilience) and that is strengthened following the storm and continues to grow (transformation resilience).
The obvious response to a strong wind or emotional turmoil might be to resist it. The basic, immediate threat response of our evolved brain and physiological systems when faced with challenge is to resist, fight, struggle or run away or freeze. As I’ve previously discussed, this works well with physical threats but less so with emotional or social threats.
In everyday culture we tend to think of resilience skills as relating to strength, perseverance, courage, grit and endurance. But can our inclination to struggle and persist in fact hinder us sometimes? The tree that bends flexibly is the one that survives to bounceback and grow.
Experiential avoidance and the control agenda
Our evolutionary programming means when difficult emotions (and the thoughts and sensations associated with them) come up generally our first response is to get rid of them or control them. We do this in lots of creative ways; by pushing them away through distraction and denial, rationalisation and telling ourselves to think positively, opting out of the things which trigger the difficulty or using substances like sugar, alcohol, drugs etc. In Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) this is known as experiential avoidance. We all do this and in moderation it can be a really useful short term strategy. The fact that it works to help us feel better temporarily reinforces this avoidance behaviour and sometimes it is even a helpful strategy in the long run as some minor problems or challenges do go away over time. Often however, this is an ineffective way of dealing with real problems in the long run as the issue typically resurfaces.
In addition the time, energy and resources involved in struggling with, and suppressing the painful feelings and associated thoughts has a psychological cost (and sometimes a practical and financial one too). I am sure we can all recognise the frustration of procrastinating about handling a task for days whilst plagued with feelings of discomfort, inadequacy and fear with accompanying thoughts of, “I can’t do it, I’m not good enough”. Only to find the task eventually takes us less time than we thought and turns out OK. Writing this blog has been an example for me!
Our culture feeds us the idea that we should be in control of our thoughts and feelings (see my previous blog on control and wellbeing
https://www.thepositivepsychologypeople.com/positive-psychology-control-and-wellbeing/) which along with our natural biological threat response exacerbates this struggle and amplifies the difficult emotions. It’s very easy to get anxiety about your anxiety, or be cross that you can’t just get on with the task. You’re then not only dealing with the original difficult emotions but all the secondary ones too.
In reality there is much in life we cannot control and hanging on rigidly to this “control agenda”, can therefore be unhelpful. Of course it is important to have good problem focused coping skills and deal with our issues in a practical way. Lots of self help programs, coaching and therapy are rightly focused around helping people find ways to define, prioritise, break down and make progress towards solutions to their problems. However, what happens when there is an issue we can’t just solve, such as a family member who has an addiction and doesn’t want to change, the death of a close friend, the issue of climate change, the conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza? When we are left with unresolvable situations, is there a better way to deal with our painful emotions than just trying to get rid of them or being controlled or paralysed by them?
Acceptance
An alternative approach is the path of acceptance. This is not about giving up but is an active, flexible way of relating and responding to emotional experiences. Acceptance is about:
- Being able to recognise, name, acknowledge and sit with our difficult feelings without judgement and without trying to change them.
- Understanding the messages these are giving us about something that matters to us in our life (our values).
- Recognising that this challenge is an integral part of being human because the things we care about by definition have the power to cause us pain when they don’t work out as we would like (“we hurt where we care”).
- Being able to respond to our pain with self compassion rather than harsh judgement which exacerbates suffering.
The more we understand and integrate our emotions the less power they have to railroad us into unhelpful behaviour and the more they become our allies in helping us find the path to the life we truly want. In resilience terms, we can bend in the wind and use its energy to move us forward towards growth rather than keep us stuck.
Talking with other people whether friends, family or trained helping professionals is one way of trying to approach this. Such resources may not always be available but acceptance skills are something we can all learn for ourselves. Tuning into your emotions, if this is not something that comes easily to you, may feel odd or uncomfortable at first. But it has many psychological benefits including improved vitality, it is often not just “difficult” emotions we resist but also those such as pride and joy meaning we can’t access the full range of human experience and our wellbeing is diminished. Better emotional awareness and acceptance also tends to increase our sense of control over our behaviour and promotes good decision making, improved intuition, a sense of safety plus the fostering of good relationships. Research consistently shows that those who are able to understand, accept and flexibly respond with kindness to their own pain have better wellbeing and resilience (extensive research papers on this subject can be found at https://contextualscience.org/resources and https://self-compassion.org/the-research/).
Learning acceptance skills
So how do you start with improving these emotional intelligence skills? Next time you are aware of emotional discomfort, notice it. Instead of rushing to distract yourself in busyness, netflix or doom scrolling take a moment to pause and ask yourself:
- What am I feeling? What is this emotion or emotions? There is often more than one, can you tease them apart?
- Name them (this helps to bring the thinking part of your brain in the frontal lobes online to counteract our unconscious threat responses). Then for the most prominent emotions-
- Try and notice how the emotion is experienced in your body. Where is it, in one place or more than one? How big is it? Does it move or is it still? Is it heavy or light? Hot or cold? Really examine it like a curious scientist. Even if the emotion feels unpleasant try not to fight with it, just observe it and let it be there. Try to make room for it.
- Notice how your mind and body respond to the emotion and try to let these responses or judgements go and focus on the sensation.
- As you breathe in, imagine your breath flowing around this emotion and opening up space for it.
- Try to hold the difficult emotion kindly rather than struggle with it. Try and treat it as a small animal in distress that needs holding gently. Perhaps try placing a kind hand over the place where you feel this emotion or by visualising a warm, caring ball of light just surrounding and holding it. This is not with the intention of changing it but just because it hurts.
- Ask yourself what this emotion is trying to tell you about the things that really matter to you in life. Sadness often relates to losing something important, anger to our rights being violated and at the other end of the spectrum pride can reinforce that our efforts have been successful and joy that our life is good and precious. Is there an action moving you towards the life you want that this emotion might be motivating you to choose?
- Remind yourself that coping with painful and pleasurable emotions and those complex dialectic ones in between such as compassion or hope is an essential part of what it is to be human and something you share with everyone else on the planet.
Do go carefully and gently with yourself when exploring your emotions and start with something not too challenging. Like any skill this takes time and practice to learn. If you feel you have particular issues in this area, seek the support of a trained mental health professional. Meditative exercises to help you access and improve your emotional flexibility can be found on free platforms such as Insight Timer as well as at: https://self-compassion.org/guided-self-compassion-meditations-mp3-2/ https://thehappinesstrap.com/
Conclusion
I suggest our humanity resides in mindfully embracing the full range of our emotions, making sense of their meanings and engaging these as resources aiding our valued choices, as part of ongoing growth and learning. In this endeavour, resilience is born and wellbeing flourishes. This is the work of Positive Psychology and acceptance is a key element in this journey.
Read more about Sarah Monk and her other articles HERE
‘We Are The Positive Psychology People’